


Hold a Candle

by x_los



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Crack Treated Seriously, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, Knotting, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Omega Verse, POV First Person, Pining, Victorian, Victorian Attitudes, Virginity, Virginity or Celibacy Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-21
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-06-14 03:16:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15379482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: Uriah Heep has always been glad to do David Copperfield any favour, and offers to perform a somewhat indecent one for the new-minted alpha. David is taken aback, but being a fresh and curious sort of young man, he's hardly uninterested.





	Hold a Candle

_Hold a candle. Be humble. Serve abjectly, as seen in the proverb. Took its rise from the habit of a host receiving an honoured guest by holding a candle in each hand and walking backwards before the arrival._

from "Passing English of the Victorian era: a dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase", James Redding Ware

 

I must suppose myself to have been about as troubled by the twin fevers of adolescence and my Nature as any young man in my position. At first these burdens felt both overwhelming and wholly particular: as though I alone in all the world was forced to endure what persons of ungentle status curtly called ‘rut’ and what persons of higher station never referred to at all, if they could help it. After the first few outright paralyzing instances of this phenomenon, accompanied by more discomfort and panic than I can now entirely credit (though I still sympathise with the violent feelings of my all-too-sensible child-self, who lives yet in my memory), I became accustomed to the aching yearning (and corresponding irritability) of my courses. They came, they went, and if I was none the better for them, I was not much the worse, either.

I recall—with some embarrassment, now—that I was rather proud of having come into my corporal estate: of being a rising alpha, with the busy, beckoning world before him. I dressed to accentuate both what figure I possessed and my status, taking excessive care with my appearance and depleting the grocer’s supply of bear grease at a rate that must have alarmed that gentleman, profit by my profligacy though he did. I was not, I think, _affected_ , precisely, but I will admit to having cultivated a lofty air I thought expressive of Dominance, which was in fact probably rather more expressive of neophyte foolishness. I have since come to know more of the matter, and have in due course learned that such posturing is another thing altogether, and no fit substitute for the easy sway exercised by a well-regulated alpha: for respect, gently earned.

One evening late in the January of my seventeenth year, when I had been two years expressed, I took a walk at the cusp of my heat to ease the restlessness that state engendered in me. This was a touch daring, with my nerves as raw as such a time must make them, but I was still quite decent and fit for company. It was only that I was abundantly alert, particularly bright-eyed and susceptible to impressions. I looked upon the frozen world with an eager hunger that I felt must almost melt the earth, be it ever so deep in frost, and call forth fresh growth and opportunity from it. The crisp night air on my cheeks gave a secondary and more seemly occasion for their hectic redness, and even a piercing buffet felt sweet against my flushed skin—like a cool, relieving touch. As you will likely credit, I was deeply interested in receiving such a caress just then. I lavished my excessively romantic youthful imagination on the form such Relieving Touch might take, and, more important still, on the form of the generous individual who might condescend to grant me such a favour. 

I returned to the Wickfield house in excellent humour, feeling fonder even than usual of its dear old crooked aspect and eager for the company I expected to find within. I have ever been constitutionally reliant on conversation and companionship. I have sometimes had cause to wonder whether my sociability derives not only from my native disposition, but also from that unhappy period of loneliness in my childhood. Whatever the cause, on the cusp of a rut I could be quite genial and gay, particularly ready to make myself agreeable. My steps turned towards Uriah Heep’s office, for it was the nearest inhabited room. To give a full account of myself, I must own that I also did so for reasons which do not often bear frank discussion. I enter into them in this account only because it is of a private nature, and, as Heep might have put it, in this matter my reasons are very relevant indeed to the case before us. 

Uriah Heep was an omega, and one I’d been long accustomed to the presence and—if you will forgive me—the scent of. As such I sought a word with him now, as unvolitionally as a flower turns to follow the sun throughout the course of the day. He’d no doubt heard my step in the hall, if he hadn’t seen me passing his window a moment before. However the matter stood, by the time I crossed Uriah’s threshold his head was turned in anticipation of my arrival, and his gaze was ready there to meet me. Without a word about the matter (and indeed almost without recognition of the fact, so accustomed were we to this exchange of civilities), we took account of one another’s Presence. Uriah registered me, in my dynamic, individual person and current condition, and I him. 

There was a distinct charge (and no little satisfaction) in this ritual, owing to our compatibility and familiarity. Persons with our native inclination towards one another often experience the play of dynamics as a quite chaste affinity. Thus I gave the resonance between us little directed thought, for the disposition of Uriah himself was more important than what category he occupied in relation to me—and it was a disposition I had not, in all our years of acquaintance, formed any fixed and certain idea of. The plain fact was that Uriah was as tricky to sound as a trench in the ocean floor during a heavy swell, and (as I sensed even before I fully understood his passionate nature and near-infernal capacities) about as dangerous. I did not know whether I liked Uriah, and I knew still less what Uriah thought of me in his heart. Yet today I was well-disposed towards everybody, and in that spirit I gave him a genuine smile of friendship, feeling nearly as pleased to see him as I could have been to see anyone living. 

“Master Copperfield!” Uriah said, returning me a tight expression of his own that stood with him for a grin. “Surely you haven’t been walking out on such a night as this!” He shook his head, bringing his hand to his chin and scraping it over that pale promontory. “Ain’t it cutting?”

“Fairly brisk,” I conceded, finishing the unbuttoning of my greatcoat—I’d been busy with my accoutrements, starting with the scarf my Aunt Betsey had presented me with at Christmas, since I’d kicked the snow off my boots upon the mat. “But I can’t say that I mind. I don’t know that there’s anything as invigorating as braving a rough night, or as welcome as coming in from one.”

“How true it is! And you do look pretty well.” He had lit a candle against the glowering sky. His eyes caught its light strangely, so that his pupils seemed darker and deeper than was their want. “But then you are blessed with a sound, strong constitution, Master Copperfield, such as not all of us can boast of.” His manner of saying it seemed somehow to imply his taking notice of my constitution in the other sense of that term, and I suspect my wind-rouged cheeks may have flushed a touch redder at the strange half-compliment. 

Uriah gestured towards me with the blunt tip of the pen he held in his thin hand. “And, if I may be so forward, how do you get on in your present circumstances, young Master Copperfield?”

I blinked at him, certain that he could not be referring to what his words seemed to imply he meant. “I beg your pardon?”

Uriah gave a little writhe of apology. “Oh, I am dreadfully sorry if I’ve overstepped myself and caused you any discomfort. It is only,” and here Uriah looked at me through his pale lashes, which caught the gleam of the candle as his eyes had, and were thus for once quite visible, “that of course, being what I am, I do _know_. I can’t _help_ but know, can I?”

I murmured that I supposed he couldn’t, feeling thoroughly caught out by his knowledge of and reference to something so intimate as to have hitherto seemed as private as my own unvoiced thoughts.

“Just so! Why, between acquaintances of such long standing as ourselves, and in strictest confidence, one may, I think, make a few little observations on the subject, such as aren’t suited to the generality.” Uriah said all this in an insinuating, friendly, matter-of-fact sort of way that seemed to make me party to his confidences, whether I would or no.

I adopted a rather high tone to secure myself a bit of the ground I felt I’d lost and said that I agreed, in principle.

“I’m so glad you take my meaning!” pursued Uriah, and he did look it. “The first few courses were _such_ a struggle for me, when I began my own at just the age you did. Mine were and are of a somewhat different nature than yours, so I’m sure I’ve no idea what you suffer! To judge by what I’ve _heard_ , an alpha’s seclusions are of another order entirely than my umble incidentals. Are they not a little hard on you?”

I laughed, not a little embarrassed and defensive. “As they must be, yes. But I hope I endure them with some equanimity, if not with the perfect discipline I might wish.” What glaring error had I committed, to be subjected to Uriah’s humiliating drawing out?

“Oh you do!” Uriah hastened assure me, though I was not fully convinced. He had sown in me a seed of doubt as to a subject I had hitherto been, perhaps unwisely, rather confident of my increasing mastery of. “You’re a gentleman about them, of course you are! It’s not for me to suggest otherwise, heavens no! But even so, do let me know if I can help you bear it in any little way! For the whole thing might go easier and come absolutely under your control if you had but a little help.”

Again Uriah took me aback. “How do you mean?” I asked.

“Well,” Uriah coughed delicately, once more squirming on his chair, “perhaps you don’t know it; which wouldn’t reflect on you, for I think most don’t! But a man of my—temperament, let us say, can ease an alpha gentleman who’s enduring his time in a great many ways which could not _possibly_ occasion the risk of certain imprudent consequences, indecorous to name.”

Such an offer from Uriah ought to have floored me in its own right, and so it should have done at any other time. But he’d picked his moment, and my mind, poised on the precipice of abandon as it was, seized at the shocking and enticing information he possessed me of as though I were a starving convict presented with bread.

“Can you mean it?” I asked, wetting my dry lips, for I knew almost nothing of the world in that way, in spite of all my feverish, insubstantial longings. The prospect of such an indiscretion sent a shiver of a moral qualm through me, but suggestible as I was just then, to my shame, I must admit to having felt a far greater shiver from a different quarter altogether.

“Oh yes,” Uriah assured me, putting down his pen and closing up Mr. Tidd, that we might escape even that eaves-dropper and converse in complete privacy. “As a matter of fact, I’d be only too pleased to show you a little of what I mean. Well,” he raked his dark eyes over me, “we’d have to be a hair circumspect about it, so no one was minded to think any ill of something quite innocuous, that’s frankly none of their business besides. But I can keep a secret, and I expect you can too.” 

From elsewhere in the house, I heard the muffled, far-off sound of a footfall. 

“Perhaps,” Uriah suggested in a low voice, “we’d do better to continue this conversation elsewhere.”

I swallowed. “All right,” I said, in a voice a pitch above a whisper. 

I left the room, managing not to look at Uriah as I did so—an act I suspected would shake my reckless courage, if that is the proper term for a sentiment halfway to madness. I feared to show myself young and foolish before the forbidding older boy, who had always seemed almost a man to me, and who, despite all his performances of fawning deference, nonetheless exerted a strange and powerful fascination over me, neither unconnected to his nature nor wholly reducible to it. I led Uriah in the direction of my own room, feeling and hearing him at my back rather than watching him follow me. He walked quite far behind me, and it struck me that it must have looked as though we were occupied on different errands in the same part of the house, and that he was cunning indeed to think to do it. My heart struck its quick-time measure hard in my chest, the excitement of our illicit conversation but a moment before blending with the humoral tension stored up in my body. I could smell Uriah strongly behind me, his pheromones seeming to have risen with our very proximity, and perhaps with his own want, too (unless his rising scent were simply a chimera, born of my present obnoxiously keen perception). He was cloying-sweet, with a relentless iron note underneath: Uriah as he always was, but with a peculiar swelling potency.

I considered Uriah Heep to be, in a good many ways, an omega par excellence: the quintessential article. I believe that for me he was almost the definitional omega, and to be truthful, he has always remained so. After all, I had met him when I was but twelve and he fifteen, and his expression had followed hard upon our introduction. His oft-boasted-of humility, his deference and the fawning manner in which he conducted himself both repelled me and could seem at times scandalously, blatantly provocative. For all Uriah declared he was very ashamed of his low inclination, I doubt that anyone could have been less so. I must own in the sacrosanct secrecy of these pages that my first embarrassing, confused tumescence came upon me whilst I was lying in the very bed Uriah, who after a moment slipped into my bedroom behind me, now looked upon, and had in fact been occasioned by catching the strong promise of him in the air. It had occurred on a day during which he’d become indisposed, and had been obliged to leave early in order to endure his swiftly-oncoming courses in privacy. I must suppose those courses to have been his first, or something very like it.

For all his manner, which emphasised his nature at every possible opportunity for doing so, Uriah was nothing like beautiful in the way an omega is conventionally supposed to be. He wasn’t at all a short, plush, delectable little dumpling of a person. He was all stretched bones, too pale and too sharp-eyed ever to make a gilded youth. Despite the fascination of his gestures, his bewitching scent and the way my own body responded to it, and despite even the acknowledged fact of my having been very definitely aroused by him on one or two occasions, I did not exactly consider Uriah in a carnal sense—or at least I never had done before now. After all, much piqued my attention, in those heady, tender days. A shapely calf had me swallowing, lost. Thus if Uriah’s attentiveness to me aroused confused feelings of pride and shame in my breast, I did not necessarily stop to ask myself what precisely that signified, and whether the source of these impressions might be more particular than the arrangement of our dispositions. Uriah was my elder, was Mr Wickfield’s clerk. There too, he constantly reminded us all that he was not of the station to which I belonged due to the twinned influences of my birth and the happy intervention of my aunt—and thus decidedly not of the sphere into which I casually, thoughtlessly assumed I should one day wed. There festered in me an anxiety about any prospect of return to the poverty of my darkest hour, and though I had buried that fear, the grave was but a shallow one. It was as though I walked a tightrope: I avoided considering what lay beneath me in relation to myself, or looking too directly down.

I was also deeply romantic, and all my ideas of that kind involved the unknown, ideal object of a future passion, who should sit in a tower menaced by dragons and wait patiently for me to slay them, that we might be together. Of what we might do then, besides gaze at one another and sometimes make love, I had no inkling. I don’t suppose it had ever occurred to me how monstrously boring it should be to live with an antique painting of a damosel. Neither was I, despite what this present account may imply, the sort to plot any seduction or contemplate deflowering persons more vulnerable than I, by virtue of their positions or their dispositions, for my own amusement. Yet Uriah’s greater age and the power of his person, his promise that we shouldn’t come to any harm and own my inexperience and longing mood all combined to make me anxious to hear his present proposition. 

As I have said, I was very young in years, and in my heart as well. 

I turned at last to Uriah, feeling something like a more successful Orpheus. My own breath caught when I saw him taking in a deep, sucking gulp of air. My room smelled of nothing to me, which is to say it smelled only of myself. I had thus wholly forgotten that to Uriah, the atmosphere of any place where an alpha habitually weathered his courses must almost constitute an intoxicant. I wondered if my bringing Uriah here looked like a piece of premeditation, and though our current assignation had been undertaken at his own suggestion in the first place I fretted over whether that Uriah should think me inclined to secure his consent on uncertain pretences. I raised my chin and resolved to be vigilant about the ethics of the matter, and to do nothing that should unduly compromise Uriah as (I had to presume, for to do otherwise would have been more than rude) a virgin omega.

“What is it you’re suggesting then, Uriah?” I asked, tilting at the tone of calm authority I had sometimes imagined, in my rut daydreams, that I should use when soothing a delicate, flustered omega (though I now suspect the object I was tilting at of having been, in fact, a windmill).

Uriah’s nostrils flared and compressed. I pretended not to notice the unconscious action, and attempted to give no quarter to the way the pit of my stomach squeezed with a sudden brutal wring of desire. 

Uriah stared at my mouth as he spoke, which he did slowly and deliberately. I tried not to fidget under his scrutiny. 

“Why, by way of easing your burden—which I expect is pretty heavy indeed—since we daren’t think of copulating,” (he said the ‘p’ with a delectable pop that made my whole body jerk) “I might entertain you in my mouth instead, if you take my meaning. You’ll have heard something of that, I expect?”

“Something of it,” I agreed, though what I had heard amounted almost to what he had just now rehearsed: that such a thing might happen, in some form. My whole notion of what carnal intimacy could consist of was so fixed on the protuberance that marked my distinctiveness as an alpha that I didn’t fully apprehend how the act he proposed—which, as I then understood it, could not involve knotting—might offer me any relief at all. Yet for all that, when Uriah said he might take me, that any part of my member might be allowed to enter the keen-eyed omega before me and given welcome therein, my confusion receded before the incoming tide of my eagerness. 

Yet I hesitated, not so much for my sake as for Uriah’s. What he proposed was not intercourse as I conceived of it, and so seemed a minor moral infraction indeed. (The observant reader will detect here the need for a more rigorous and open sexual education for the youth of England—my father’s death and then my mother’s had curtailed my own, and this lacunae had never quite been remedied.) Yet often my Aunt Betsey had cautioned me that an omega risked more in intimate encounters than I could readily conceive of. Uriah had, in essence, indicated that we might engage in such activities before he entered my influencing domain. But if I were to lay aside that point, it seemed to me that I must then consider another: had my need as an alpha perhaps called this offer forth from him?

“I should very much like to try it,” I said, hoping that he could hear and see my sincerity and thus should not feel himself slighted, which anyone disliked and Uriah particularly abhorred. “But Uriah, should you want to do a thing like that? I admit that I do not precisely see how it could benefit or please you.”

“Oh, don’t you think it!” Uriah insisted, loosening the white cloth about his neck in what I found to be a distracting fashion. “Why, I could hardly call myself an omega if I weren’t touched to the marrow by an alpha’s suffering—it’s simply my nature.” 

For all his obsequiousness, Uriah had never struck me as universally genial and benevolent. Thus I did not quite trust him in this, even as I found his own explanation of his interest curiously unsatisfying. His words were too close to the substance of my fears of having over-powered him, and I was and am vain enough to wish to be appealing and liked in my own person rather than for what I am. 

“I’d be ever so delighted by the opportunity to do you a good turn,” Uriah continued, laying his kerchief aside and slipping the top-most buttons of his shirt loose. This revealed a pale neck that gleamed in the light of the candle he’d brought with him from his office. That flickering light had been at my back as we ascended the stairs. It had cast his shadow, as he walked behind me, on the walls in eerie silhouettes. 

I must have looked as though I was about to demur—indeed I was. Uriah’s eyes narrowed, and his voice grew more pleasant and slower still, and more determined. It was as though he had me under his thumb and was grinding down, fixing me just where he wanted me. 

“Besides, don’t think I wouldn’t relish sucking you off!” he persisted warmly, taking off his decent black jacket and, to my great surprise, simply dropping it to the ground in the most careless fashion. “Don’t you think it for a moment! Now it might not directly benefit me in quite the same way it would you,” Uriah allowed, standing before me in shirtsleeves and taking the opportunity to flex his shoulders out of their usual hunch, “but never doubt that it’d afford me certain other satisfactions. I haven’t done this myself, and as I should like the experience, I'd look upon your taking up my invitation as a great favour! Now, should you like to get underway?” 

He asked that last as though he weren’t standing before me, having just prepared himself to get down on his knees and ‘suck me off’, and having in that very preparatory action driven most of my capacity for rational thought from me even as I watched him do it.

“Yes,” I said, perhaps a trifle more zealously than I’d intended to. I was shocked to see Uriah grin; it was the first time I’d ever seen him manage it. It seemed he was not shy and reluctant, as I had been told an omega might be in such a circumstance. Neither was he mindless with passion, as certain other rumours had suggested, or simply yielding before the strength of my desire. 

I had sufficient proofs, then, to suppose that Uriah wanted this. He wanted me. Here he stood, actively and cannily scheming to get me in him, however he could manage it, and at least as involved in the process as I myself was. He banished my trepidation on that score with his definite desire. In fact I believe that in that moment, Uriah filled in some of my poorly-sketched ideas of what I might want from love and from my life. I still wished to give my energy and passion to some bright object, but now I knew it should never be enough for me unless I were desired, with corresponding rational conviction and depth of feeling, in return. I saw, yet dimly, but I did see, that I would go hungry without receiving such qualities in abundance from another eager soul, and that I should starve if even a banquet of milder and more general fare was spread before me.

“The whole of it will be strictly above-board,” he promised me. “We won’t even undress, either of us. We needn’t, that’s the beauty of it! How’s that for decency, eh?” He gave a soundless laugh, and I a feeble smile. 

I said a word of agreement. I had hardly voiced my fear to undertake these unfamiliar acts even to myself, and yet it seemed he knew it all. I almost resented that an omega was soothing _me_ , for it made me feel my youth pretty sharply. And then in an instant I forgot my hesitation and my dented pride alike: indeed I rather doubt that I could have told you my own name. For Uriah had rubbed his hands together and then dropped to his knees before me in a single movement, as though he were a tree that had been expertly felled. 

“There we are,” Uriah breathed, unbuttoning my trousers with a long white hand and letting the panel fall as though he were opening a box that contained a highly-anticipated delivery. His other hand was occupied holding my hip. The pad of his thumb stroked my hip bone in a way that made me bite my lip, even as his patient, repetitive touch soothed me. 

As Uriah surveyed me, I battled an absurd urge to ask if he’d any opinion of me, for I’d no idea how I compared to other men in this regard. But he heaved a pleased sigh that left me in little doubt of his appreciation. His wide mouth curled in satisfaction, and he inclined his head to kiss me. 

“Oh!” I gasped, then checked myself, for I’d said it rather loudly. “Oh,” I said again, this time in a whisper, as he pressed his lips against the length of me. He did it quite chastely at first, but this gave way to great, sloppy kisses, wet and fervent and accompanied by loud breathing and quiet moans—I was almost ashamed to be able to hear him. I flushed, wondering if he needed to be quite so noisy, and I squirmed, enjoying his enjoyment. Uriah licked me, head and knot and stem, as though I were a sweet he adored. I grew excessively proud under his attentions, and my knees grew correspondingly weak. I sat down on the bed, hard, and without a pause he scrambled after me on his knees, bracing my own open with his great hands and tonguing at my knot with special devotion. 

“ _My_ ,” he muttered, casting his wicked, gleaming eyes up at me. “How stout you are here, Copperfield!” He brought a hand to the shaft and stroked; I choked and jerked into his hand. “Perhaps you don’t know it, but it’s quite something to be so sturdily built. Quite something, indeed! It won’t be easy for me to get this thick, stubborn thing in, you know.” He sighed and shook his head. “But I expect it’ll be all the better for it. How _fat_ you are just here, what an indulgence you’ll be for me! Not to mention this—” Uriah’s finger’s strayed down to my bulky knot, and he positively shivered. “I can’t even imagine what a great thing like that should feel like, stretching my poor body wide for it. Really I can’t!”

He watched his effect on me like a cat watched a mousehole, and with all the pleasure of one that had the cream, besides. Well he might have done, for it was a blissful agony to hear him talk in such a way, and I thought of nothing but stopping up his mouth and throat with the organ he so anticipated. “Uriah,” I whined, hot and breathless, “please!”

“Why, I beg your pardon!” Uriah said, shaking his head. “Here I’ve been dawdling, letting the moments slip away in these little confidences and exploring you as if we’ve all the time in the world when you’re suffering. Dear me!”

“I am not suffering, Uriah,” I managed, “I just—I want—”

“Oh, I know what you want!” Uriah assured me, and he promptly proved it by sucking the head of my cock into his mouth. He then admitted an inch or so of the longer part of me. I brought my hand up to my own mouth to bite it in order to keep from making too great a racket, and fought like anything to keep my hips from jerking frantically, for it seemed my body would stop at nothing to force another scrap of me into Uriah’s hot mouth. Occasionally there was a hint of teeth—the testament of inexperience—but I was too wild to care, and Uriah learned fast. Soon he ventured another inch, and all this while he took little care to mitigate either the gulping, ravenous noise attendant on his ministrations or his own cock-stifled hums of pleasure. 

What a thing it was to be made such a meal of! To feel such pleasure and to know that in doing so I also benefitted another, to know myself enjoyed, absolutely luxuriated in! I saw now what Uriah had hoped to achieve by our exchange, beyond my being indebted to him for his generosity. Uriah relished the act. If he played up his mewls for my no doubt evident satisfaction then it was only to give appropriate testimony to his authentic desire, which had him plunging down on me heedlessly, gripping my thigh as if I might try to get away from him and the base of my cock as if I might come too soon and spoil his fun. 

Uriah looked up at me and tried to speak, but I couldn’t make him out around the obstruction in his throat, which in and of itself made me want to peak on the spot. I whimpered as Uriah slid off me in order to make his point more clearly.

“If it don’t make my jaw ache!” He shook his head, grinning his hardest grin, as though this were a delightful discovery. “What trouble it is to wrap my mouth around this portly gentleman here,” he stroked me to indicate what he meant, “and to ease his way down. But _such_ a pleasure it is too, Master Copperfield. Lord, the taste of you, and the feel of you, too!”

“Oh please Uriah,” I begged, “God in heaven, finish me, I can’t bear it!” His talk did nothing but enflame me. My knot was swollen, dark with intent, and though an alpha comes slowly by design I could feel my peak just out of reach. 

Cheerfully he resumed his work. He tried pushing his lips up and down a little experimentally, as though his mouth were another orifice entirely. He then took a deep breath and then me, deep as he dared, sucking the very life out of me. I wanted to weep, and may have come near to it. I came tremendously, pouring and pouring myself out into him, thrusting into my blissfully greedy haven. It was only when my vision cleared that I understood that, to my chagrin, I’d gripped Uriah’s head and held him in place that I might better pitch myself down his throat. I was mortified and released him with many apologies, but Uriah brushed it off with a gesture, looking Miltonically triumphant. My knot pulsed in a phantom home, and with a leisurely shove of his vast hand Uriah pushed me back on the bed, where he followed me. He wrapped a hand around my ‘locked’ member, and I shivered and bucked in that firm, comforting grip until at last I subsided, whispering nearly tearful thanks to him all the while, assuring him that it had been splendid and that I felt such relief from my rut as I had never known or thought possible. 

I looked up at Uriah’s mouth, and was a little embarrassed when he, catching the drift of my gaze, asked if I should like to kiss him. Shyly I said that I thought I should, and we exchanged a queerly chaste press of lips, closed and lingering. I felt my cheeks and chest and loins ache with it that contact. I wondered that so slight a touch should affect me so terribly, especially given the way that very mouth had ravished me but a moment ago.

I then watched Uriah remedy the problem that had arisen during our interlude. Uriah leaned back, still lying on the bed beside me. Briskly, through his clothes, he rubbed a long hand over his cock, arching his spine and hissing, shutting his eyes and gritting his teeth. I was fascinated, enrapt. I leaned forward, and yet I felt ashamed that I should be so selfish when he had been so excessively good to me (even if I knew for a fact that he had enjoyed being so for his own part). 

“Couldn’t I help, Uriah?” I asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. The long outline of him, visible through his decent black trousers, intrigued me. I felt a lump forming in my throat, and an itch to touch in my fingers.

Uriah shook his head, his eyes still closed. “Hardly any time for it, Master Copperfield, I’m so worked up.” He turned his head and his lips grazed my knuckles. I felt his breath on my skin. Indeed he came in but a moment. His mouth opened in a silent cry, and his eyes flew open to fix mine with a searing gaze that left me feeling dreadfully, intoxicatingly exposed. I felt heady with alpha pride, for he had come before me, and my body seemed to take it as though _I_ had satisfied an omega. It was my first taste of the smug, snug sweetness that must accompany the fulfilment of that happy duty.

Uriah bid me farewell briskly, not having much to do to make himself presentable. A brisk employment of his handkerchief whilst turned away from me seemed to suffice for the moment. He said he hoped he’d been able to assist me, called himself my umble servant and accepted my repeated thanks with demurrals on that account. He gave a rather dramatic bow and slipped away, leaving me shipwrecked on my own bed as though I’d been devastated by a hurricane. 

It then occurred to me that Uriah’s helping me had been a matter of alleviating my rut, which had gone some way to excusing the incident. Helping him similarly wouldn’t be. I wondered if Uriah resented my asking, which might imply, to one as ready with a negative construction as Uriah, something disparaging about my opinion of his condition and morals. Though surely he’d forgive my having offered, if he had taken it amiss, given my own excited state at the time? 

Yet I knew that if matters between us _were_ to devolve to outright sexual dalliance, unmotivated by exceptional biological need, I would regretfully have to concede the immorality of such dealings (even if I thought them nothing like as serious as intercourse, staggeringly passionate though the experience had been). I should thus have been obliged to put an end to that state of affairs. Perhaps Uriah, eager as he had been when licensed to display it (more than ‘licensed’, for had I not outright encouraged him with my every choked groan and desperate glance?), had similar compunctions, or sought to keep our interaction well-bounded. 

It would be like Uriah, I thought with a strange trace of emotion half bitter and half wistful, to be precise and constrained even in this, and to prefer his contractual relations conducted very orderly.

***

It was the mildest rut I had ever passed, gentle and replete with memories of a mouth that, if not precisely sweet, was certainly as eager as anyone could wish, and certainly knew its business! I luxuriated in a lust unmarred by periods of senselessness and streaks of outright pain, and blessed Uriah as the author of it. 

Heep knew nothing of this, for he volunteered no mention of what had passed between us in the following days, and even in private I could hardly allude to a matter that so concerned his reputation. His own heat period came and went, and while I visited him to make polite conversation, angling for an opening to make a gallant reciprocal offer, he provided me with none. That master helmsman positively steered me away from the subject, and nearly dismissed me from his office. I was obliged to take both a hint and myself elsewhere. It seemed I had been right to understand Uriah’s refusal of reciprocity as an attempt to establish certain limits, so far as our activities went. When I thought more on it I could see the sense in such actions, and remembered again Betsey’s caution that an omega risked more than an alpha in intimate encounters. Could Uriah absolutely trust anyone not to take too great an advantage of him in the wildness of his heat, ‘umble’ as he felt himself? To help him without overstepping? Did I arrogantly trust my own as-yet untried self-control in the face of a heated, too-willing and too-enticing omega as absolutely as that? It should certainly be rude to press offers of assistance I would gladly give if a lady were unwilling to receive my aid. And so too, I told myself sternly, would it be a piece of incivility to presume upon Uriah’s hinted wishes, which were, after all, his own affair. 

Yet I was more eager than was seemly to know whether Uriah would be amenable to offering me the same assistance again. As it happened, only a few weeks passed before Uriah came upon me in a hallway, halting me with a ‘Master Copperfield!’ and catching up to me in a few long-legged strides. He put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and murmured into my ear that if I should feel any little return of the old trouble, I ought to tell him of it, confide in him straight away, and he’d do what he could for me, if he might be of any help in his umble capacity. His tone was conversational, guiltless. He wove past me then as though nothing in the world of significance had been said, and I must say I admired his nerve. 

“Why Master Copperfield!” he cried so brightly as to make me wince when, a week later, I came into his office in the same condition in which I’d entered it on that particularly remarkable day a month before. 

“Whatever brings you here?” He said it as if I never called on him, which I found irritating in its falsity (and in that it made me somewhat guilty—ought I to call on him more?). He looked me up and down, and his eyes glinted with that knowing look of his as if to say he knew what I was after. I was not a little embarrassed. For a petulant moment I was almost minded to invent some pretext for my having called and leave, for I felt unpleasantly patronised by the elder boy. But I squared myself against what I knew to be childish ingratitude in me, and quite formally told Uriah that I’d a problem I’d appreciate his assistance with. He’d be only too appy, apparently. Only too!

He joined me in my room after finishing his work. I’d been anxiously awaiting him, finding concentration impossible in my present condition and with such a prospect before me. 

Feeling foolish, I hospitably offered him a seat beside me. His long legs made my old bed look too low to the ground, like a piece of dolls’ furniture. Uriah wrapped his arms around himself, and I wondered how might feel to hold—if his bony shoulders should be sharp, or if he would wriggle like a caught fish. I found I could hardly think of anything but touching and being touched, yet I was positively stuck for the words that ought to begin it. It seemed rut and Uriah had together exhausted my conversational powers. 

Hesitantly I clutched his hand, cool against my heated one. I closed my eyes and went to kiss him as I had done before, but on this occasion he surprised me by opening his mouth a very little. Our tongues slid against one another, his breath hitched as if he liked it and I twisted a hand in his neck cloth—so very prim, as though he were warding off lustful alphas who abounded in the legal profession and roved in packs to claim the likes of him. I pushed Uriah to the bed and kissed him again, needing to do it—to be atop him, pushing some part of myself in, with him ever so accommodating. 

“Oh,” I breathed, “oh heavens I need you, Uriah. How I find I need you! How you teach me to do it!”

Uriah said nothing, but looked at me as though _I_ had said something of great moment. I was startled and pleased to discover he might like to hear me speak, which I had not hitherto considered, and which ran right alongside my rut-puffed desired to make myself agreeable. Uriah slid down the length of me as though he were falling, his fingers splayed out in the fierce grip of a man clinging to a cliff face. On this occasion he was silent, as though he were being cautious. I soon discovered that I missed his teasing when it was absent, his vocalised enjoyment, the fierceness of his lust. And yet I chastised myself for entertaining such a piece of churlishness (for wasn't he being a generous host to be now, and oughtn't I to be grateful?), and soon couldn’t hold onto it. Uriah was slow and studied this time, tracing me with his tongue the way his finger ran along the lines of text in his law books. It was as if he were just as determined to learn and to possess himself of me. Absorption, in every sense: Uriah fixed his whole, considerable attention upon me, took me in, and by and by apprehended me entirely. I felt as though I dissolved into him at the point where we connected. 

Sliding his whole mouth up and down on me, plunging me in ever deeper—and I? Drunk on our comingled ragged breathing, the susurrations swinging together in something seductively like a song. He was making a trial of this, of that, varying his method of approach, seeing what he might do with me, make of me, and I thought, this is how Uriah thinks, what he glories in. I seemed to simply know it, just as though I had in truth become some part of him, or he of me. I was so fond of Uriah in that moment, and when I murmured his name and stroked his head with a possessive tenderness I could feel him shake around me, and the head of my cock buzzing deep in his throat where he’d daringly taken it. 

“Brave boy,” I whispered with feeling. “My very dear old thing.”

Even as my knot swelled I reminded myself over and over again, the fixed notion piercing through my distraction, that I mustn't do as I had done last time and brutally force Uriah to take the lot. Far more decorous to pull out before the crucial moment. Perhaps too, I thought of Uriah’s unwillingness for me to bear him company during his heat, and wanted to show myself more a gentleman than he’d found me, more restrained and more worthy of trust. But Uriah made a cry of baffled protest when, just before my peaking, I gently pushed him off me. 

Uriah seemed to understand what I sought to spare him, but not why. With unexpected strength and what I believe to have been a degree of panic, Uriah dragged me back to him, pushing me deeper than I’d yet been, only closing his eyes with satisfaction and making soothed sounds when he was drinking me down—for I must admit to having reached a sudden, sharp conclusion on the basis of his evident desperation for me and the willing way my omega (for in that moment, I did think him mine) was offering up this extra millimetre of licensed violation to please me and to satisfy himself. I supposed I could see why an omega would balk at a rejection at such a time as this, and at the loss of alpha seed. I was rather chagrined not to have guessed as much in the first place, and to have shown myself thoughtless even in trying to remedy my earlier misstep (for whatever Uriah’s preferences as to my spending, holding his head down as I had done could not have been polite).

To remedy it—as Uriah continued to suck the length of me, up to my throbbing knot, through my locking period—I stroked his bony shoulders and the bones and planes of the harsh architecture of his face. My hand wandered across the soft, exertion-wet, downy crown of his violently red head. Too replete to feel foolish, I told my deliverer time and again how he’d pleased me, what a clever and diligent omega he was, what a fine mate he’d make one day, and how grateful I was for how well he’d eased me on that previous occasion, and this one. I said I should never forget his kindness, or the rapture of it. Uriah squirmed a good deal but didn’t look up to meet my eyes, and continued his slow, soft suction of my cooling cock, half simply cradling it in his mouth in a way that felt comfortable and delightful. It was something, I thought with a decided twitch, like Uriah’s quim must feel, after the completion of the act itself. 

When he decided I was done, Uriah released me with a great lascivious smack. He flipped onto his back and scooted up the bed with the strange dexterity of a Conger-eel. He then shoved a white hand down partly-unbuttoned trousers, and with a jerk I realised he wasn’t touching his stiff cock this time, but—there. His most secret site of pleasure, and the very core of my rut-driven desires. The roar of my alpha blood was gentled by satiation to something akin to the sound of the ocean in a shell held to the ear. As such I wanted fiercely, but not to the point of helpless uncontrol. I could watch Uriah touch his cunt with only a weak moan.

Once more Uriah fixed his eyes on mine, and I watched him crook his bony fingers into his quim. He briskly fingered himself and made the most obscene noises I have ever heard. My spent cock spasmed in response, and I could not have looked away for crowns nor kingdoms. Uriah jerked, it was over in seconds, and then he dragged a shining, slick-coated hand that reeked of raw, narcotic sex out of his trousers. I swallowed hard, reeling like one who'd eaten opium. Uriah then took a strongly scented handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and wiped his fingers clean with practiced efficiency, as though he weren’t destroying something fine in doing so. 

I thanked Uriah with deep sincerity, and accepted his queer smile in return.

“Oh, my pleasure!” he gushed. He kissed his hand to me in a clownish farewell, and I laughed with him.

A less uncertain and more comfortable month passed then, during which I felt a good deal more in my element. I managed to cordially offer Uriah my own services when we were alone, and he thanked me and said he would consider it. He said it wasn’t a light matter, and that he’d hate for me to feel offended if he couldn’t answer me directly, ‘leastways not straight away.’ I decided to simply tell him some of what I’d thought earlier regarding his reasons for demurring, omitting only an account of my own fear of making a fool of myself before him, and said I should of course respect his wishes—that he might continue to understand my help as offered, but not as pressed upon him where it was not wanted. He smiled in a rather unguarded way and said I was ever a deep one, wasn’t I? Having only recently discovered that Uriah had such a thing as a smile about him, I was especially satisfied to have earned that rare commodity. If he teased me a little, what did I care? Uriah had always seemed to me difficult to please, and I’d never been certain he actually liked me. Though he’d his own reasons for entering into our arrangement, which term I was now fairly certain I might apply to our proceedings, Uriah certainly seemed to enjoy aspects of my person and company quite genuinely. I thus balanced a decided effort to build upon this foundation and to be attentive to a man I now saw as my friend with another not to seem, not to _be_ , cloying. 

“Good evening, Uriah,” I said when time came ‘round again, locking the door of his tower office room behind me as I entered. I was in my gregarious and playful mood, and pressed my luck a little with a buoyant confidence. It was late, and I slipped behind his chair. Seated as he was, I could quite comfortably bend down to address him. “I wonder if you’d be so _very_ good as to assist me again?”

I thought I could feel Uriah grinning; it was certainly there in his voice. “Should you like that, Master Copperfield?” He stroked his chin with a long hand. 

“I don’t know that I should like anything better, Mister Heep,” I assured him, stroking my own hand down the arm of his jacket. “You are so very talented, you know. I can’t speak from a wide range of experience, but I’d insure your mouth for a million at Lloyds, at the least!”

Uriah snorted, and I whirled around him and neatly set his things aside, that I might pop myself into their place on his desk. He raised an eyebrow and I unfastened my trousers, bringing myself to bear. I found he took the encouragement to speak which my patter implied, seeming a little flattered by my evident desire, on this our third encounter, for that aspect of our first. 

“Can’t wait to fuck my mouth, I see!” His tone was a touch playful, but his grip when he applied it was very firm, as if he owned the place. I felt a trace of genuine chagrin at my eagerness for him, for I’d hardened up in his hand at a touch, just as though he did. And I squirmed a little because it was true. I’d been thinking of this all day, all _week_ , counting the minutes until the Wickfields retired. Uriah looked as though he knew it all, and appreciated it immensely. 

He shook his head, looking at his prize with admiration and fondling it extravagantly. “What a handsome gentleman you’ve got here, Master Copperfield! It ain’t uncomfortably long, I find, but lord it’s shapely. This plump crown is a favourite of mine, I don’t mind telling you. What a great beast of a knot this is! And how your hips want to go—I’ve seen how you have to work to still em! Such a _stud_ you are, Master Copperfield.”

I blushed furiously now, feeling Uriah was half mocking me—a conviction I had more often than I was comfortable with. This was ridiculous. It was also keenly affecting. It seemed I loved Uriah telling me how he wanted me, for it made me feel so grown and powerful and desirable, just as if he did mean it all, and yet as though we shared a joke.

“You’re right of course,” I breathed, pushing the much-admired crown towards his mouth as though I’d make him a king, whether he would or no. “I am impatient. But then how could I be otherwise, with such an able, pliant omega offering his assistance? More than accommodating me—” I let out a sigh as Uriah leaned forward and swept a circuit of my cockhead with his tongue, then opened his mouth to let me in. “You’re delightfully wanton. Positively greedy for me.”

Uriah’s eyes flared. His cheeks went hectic, and I was treated to a second rare sight: Uriah’s nigh-mythical embarrassment. I suspected that he liked this sort of talk _because_ he found it a little uncomfortable, a little over-true. It wasn’t every omega who’d think to offer such a favour, though I hardly judged Uriah for having done so—after all, the atmosphere of illicitness aside, I thought there was nothing precisely wrong in what we were doing. All omegas wanted, but evidence indicated Uriah ached and throbbed for this, outright _adored_ doing this for me, to me. 

“That’s right,” I breathed. “You know how to please me. You know it very well. Take me a little deeper, if you’d be so good. Isn’t it clever of you to have learned how to do that? But then I suppose you needed it, didn’t you Uriah? What a dear fellow you are.” I petted him, stroking his cheek. “And how nicely you take everything I can spend—how it satisfies me to know I’ve come in you.”

Uriah sucked me harder at that, as though trying to give me a reward for having said it. 

“That’s good,” I panted, clawing my fingers into the lip of the desk. “Oh heavens, you are good. Lord, puss, I’m so close already.” 

Uriah pulled back and I whined at it, thinking he intended to make me last like thinned-out wine. But then I caught sight of his fierce expression, and he caught me up in his most insinuating tone.

“Don’t hold back, now,” he suggested. “Thrust the knot right home. Make me take the whole thing, so I can feel you in the back of my throat.” I was as shocked as I was riveted by his suggestion. “Uriah, that can’t be how it’s done!” 

“Perhaps not usually, no,” Uriah said as though it were nothing. 

“Won’t you choke?” I demanded. 

Uriah laughed at me, with no nastiness in it. “Bless you, no.”

It occurred to me that he’d been practicing for this, and I again felt foolish not to have seen what he was about. 

“But it shall certainly hurt,” I persisted, cleaving to the wish I’d articulated within myself that first night of protecting his interests in these matters. It was something of a struggle: I was near rut, still relatively inexperienced, and by god I wanted to do it. I longed to force myself into Uriah more deeply still, and for him to struggle against his body and discipline himself to doing this for me and for the want of me. In my mind’s eye I saw him fighting to breathe but still wanting it, with all his implacable will. I ached to feel myself surrounded by the pale clench of his throat, and to feel him swallow, and to knot in the tight hollow of his mouth. He was so skin-and-bones, I thought I ought to fill him right up—and the bulge of his cheeks would be near enough to finish me.

Knotting, in a somewhat essentialist sense, was sex entire to me. In the moment I didn’t stop to think that in doing this we should be crossing what was, to me, a significant threshold. I only thought of Uriah’s lips closing around the very base of me, and of finding myself so savoured and cherished as that. Yet for all the amply-imagined luxury of the tableaux before me, I shook my head. “I don’t think we ought to, Uriah.”

Uriah leaned forward, as if even in privacy he still needed to do it in order to convey this secret to me. “It’ll hurt, will it? It’ll stretch me and make me feel it a little, in days to come? Well I’ll love it, I promise you. I want you to just ruin my mouth, Copperfield. If I get a bruise or two, why, so much the better!”

I believe I may have said something unprintable, and though I write in longhand, joined-up like a regiment, I shall nonetheless observe the conventions of the medium. My hapless outburst surprised my companion into a soundless laugh. It was outlandish, as he often was—how Uriah’s several hints of grotesquery (enough to solve a hundred crimes by, I don’t doubt) only served to draw me deeper into fascination, I cannot say, but thus it had ever been. I then irritably wondered if there was any imprudent notion of his that Heep couldn’t corkscrew me into acting on, somehow or other. 

“Now usually I wait to take care of my own encumbrance, so that I can focus wholly on you in the moment—but do you mind if this time I touch myself while you fuck my mouth?” Uriah asked with surprising politeness. “If you’ll hold my head in place to do it, I think we might both get on very nicely.” 

I made a theatrically gracious gesture. “Are you certain I can’t do anything beyond that to help?”

“Oh no,” Uriah shook his head. “You’ll be far too busy for that!”

For all his talk of ruination, at first Uriah took me slowly, making his way to Land’s End like a careful pilgrim. Then he turned over the reins, stopping his movement, and so I began to take _him_ slowly (to his obvious frustration). The creeping glide of his mouth up and down the length of me was a hypnotic pleasure, and I felt I could have cheerfully submitted to it for days on end. But pressure built in me, and Uriah, twitching frustration warring with submission, pushed. Thus I found myself sliding into the omega with more speed and energy, gingerly forcing the thick head of my member down his throat. Uriah breathed hard through his flaring nostrils, his eyes watered and his fingers gripped my hips, digging in like an embattled army. At last—and Uriah gave a muffled, desperate cry when I did it, pain and longing and victory blending in the sound—I began to properly rock up into him, to use him with a touch of savage need. Rut coursed through me, try and hold it back though I had, and the idea of properly fucking Uriah, of making him have me and marking him, took hold of me. As promised, I held him in place while I finished enjoying him. Uriah worked himself frantically, seemingly with no thought of display, for it was artless and graceless and wondrous. I locked in Uriah and spent my cooling period with him limp under my hands, the whole length of my cock in him my knot locked hard in his poor mouth, enticingly stretching his misused lips. Everything I had to give was swilling in Uriah, leaving him full to the brim with me. When we finally decoupled I thought I’d never seen Uriah so dazed and raw, so sweetly exhausted with submission. He couldn’t rise without stumbling or speak without a slur, but his was a blissful lassitude that made me feel highly sympathetic towards him. I ventured so far as to hold him after, in that state, while I vowed he was a delightful fuck (for he’d liked my earlier cursing so well), a treasure all unlooked for, and ought I to get him some water, or a cup of tea perhaps?

Imagine my horror when, the next day, Uriah had to tell everyone he’d lost his voice due to a cold. He could speak, but his utterances were was ragged and soft. To my shame I could hardly hear them without being wracked with corresponding reverberations of desire. I absented myself for the proper advent of my rut, haunted by the echo of that husky, broken ‘Master Copperfield.’ I wondered, in my rut delirium, if I’d left bruises under his cravat. I wondered if Uriah would finger those fading traces in his own heat, while he touched himself. I found I prayed he would, for I wanted him to remember me very fondly, and certainly to think of no other alpha in that needful hour.

***

I started when, the next month, Uriah swept into my room, gently tapping the door shut behind him with the heel of his foot and rubbing his hands together as though he sought to start a fire between them. 

“About time for another constitutional, ain’t it Master Copperfield?”

I caught his scent and reeled. Uriah was certainly ‘blooming,’ as his mother might have delicately put it. 

“Uriah,” I said carefully, “are you quite certain you’re feeling well enough to partake?” 

That was as close as I dared come to observing that Uriah was on the cusp of his heat, and though decent, in a day or two certainly should not be. I knew we were both made a little vulnerable to injudiciousness on that account, for he felt his unseasonable warmth and I responded to it. Yet even as I forced myself to ask, I found myself stiffening at the heady, unctuous musk I could detect even through his clothes, and at the prospect of having Uriah like this. I found that without my having decided to do it I was breathing him in as though I’d shoved my face into a honeysuckle bush. 

“Oh heavens, that you should be concerned about me!” said Uriah, unbuttoning his jacket. “I’m feeling very fine indeed, thank you. Why, I’ve never felt so disposed to it!” He paused and eyed me. “But you know, I have been thinking—this would go easier for me if you’d undress.”

I hesitated, wanting it but fearing to be literally stripped bare before him. He apparently understood my hesitation. 

“Perhaps,” and his lips twitched in a way that made me wonder if he weren’t a little nervous himself—a prospect which reassured me greatly, “you’d feel it a deal easier to undertake if I were to do it with you? Why, then we’d both be in the thing together! I’m sure I can’t imagine feeling frightened, with you beside me.”

Was that at all the case? If so, it might have been the sweetest and most flattering testimony I’d every yet been given by anyone, whatever the reason Uriah felt that way. How could I not wish to earn such a sentiment?

“I think I should, Uriah.”

He’d always done the thing in his shirtsleeves, but now he didn’t stop there. I fumbled with my own buttons while watching him attend to his, riveted, and though Uriah similarly kept his eyes glued to me he seemed a good deal defter in his preparations. 

“Is that satisfactory?” I asked, sitting back down on my bed naked as I was born, blushing (as I could hardly hope to conceal) but making an effort to sound assured. 

In wordless answer Uriah knelt on the floor between my knees and rubbed my cockhead against his lips, painting them with the shining slickness already beading there. I cried out at the filthy spectacle; he soothed me. He gave me the gentlest of caresses and I watched him at work, my chest heaving: the inclining crown of his furious red head, the long stretch of his pale, bony, sinewy neck and back. The strange shape of him loomed, though he was below me. I felt as though I looked at a great fish swimming below the skin of the water, and wondered how something so large and powerful—for there was certainly tenacious strength in Uriah’s wiry body—should give itself over to pleasing me. I put my hands on his shoulders and thought they looked small there, and at the same time that his bones were so thin that I might cup them in my hands. I did. I rolled them, working his tense shoulders, and he gasped and nuzzled me. 

Against the wall of my room there stood a sturdy dressing table. In its mirror I often observed the effects of my efforts with bear grease and to otherwise make myself up to advantage. Now, however, given our positions, I could see Uriah’s snowy arse and the backs of his thighs in it, and how he’d curled his long frame beneath him in his effort to indulge me. I could see how the light of my candle played on a drip inching its way down the back of his thigh, he was that slick for me. My mouth parted. My heart hammered to see him.

“Open your legs,” I murmured. I do not know how I dared command it, save that I was an alpha near my rut, and perhaps it was not in me _not_ to do so. 

Uriah stopped what he was doing. He then slid his knees further apart until he was splayed wide, and in the mirror I could see him very well indeed. Even when I’d been spent it had nigh undone me to know that, though I hadn’t been able to see him at it, Uriah was touching his cunt before me. Now he was actually _displaying_ it at my behest. That fascinating article was wet and pink as the interior of a conch shell, pulled from the lapping tide. How wonderful it seemed to me, that nature should offer up objects of such strange and perfect design! For all that I might have mastered myself, had Uriah not slipped a hand down to tend to his snug cunny, that I might see him do it. 

“God in heaven, Uriah,” I panted, “it is too much!” I yanked him up by the scruff of his neck. Uriah yelped and went lax, docile under my hand, in accordance with his native inclination. I used my guiding hand to draw Uriah down with me and to roll him under me, feeling the whole of his heat-warmed body against mine. The room felt bitterly cold everywhere we weren’t touching. I discovered that Uriah’s long limbs were nearly hairless, and that they slid against mine deliciously. I kissed and kissed him, touching him everywhere. My excitement was ratcheted up by these caresses and by the frankincense blending of our scents, exotic and mysterious and decadently rich. I felt my cock against his stomach, and his against my thigh, and it was almost too fine. I pressed Uriah into my bed with the length of my body, and when he wrapped his limbs around me I nearly bit him in the sort of fashion one can’t readily forget.

“I should like something,” Uriah hissed into my ear. Boldly, I pressed my teeth against his arm—nothing like the claiming bite I had narrowly avoided, but a strong enough allusion to make Uriah jerk against me like a fish on a line. 

“Ask, and you shall have it,” I said confidently, pressing a kiss to the skin I’d bitten. “Lord, what a delight _you_ are to have!”

“I wouldn’t want you to do anything compromising, of course,” Uriah said, running his hands over my back, “but you see how I am tonight, don’t you, Copperfield?” He sighed into my ear. “I’m so _wanting_ this evening. You’ve worked me up a treat, I don’t mind telling you. Could you just tease me a little, with that gorgeous plump head you've got? Mind, I only want you to run it over my cunt. Just press it against me. Don’t let me have it, now! Just let me know what it might be to feel that thick brute popping into me.”

I swallowed. It was a bold request indeed, but even now our erections were pressed between us. What Uriah wanted wasn’t much more than that. He’d never yet asked anything of me, and what a thrill it should be to touch him there—to know, in any degree, the sacred mystery of an omega’s nature.

I sat up a little on my knees and took myself in hand, and without being asked Uriah spread his knees obscenely wide once more. His arms went around my neck. I looked down and, carefully, brought myself just to the brink of him. I slowly ran my cockhead up and down the warm folds of him, treating myself to the damask softness and letting that viscous slick give my head a shine. Uriah whimpered and panted.

“That’s it,” he breathed, “taunt me with it. I’ve hardly been good enough for _that!_ Lord it feels heavenly. Press a little harder, make me feel what I shan’t be getting. Oh Christ. Oh _David._ ” 

My stomach twisted into desiring knots. I’d never been so hard—my knot was taking already! 

“But now that you’ve shown me who’s alpha and had me drenched and begging for you like the tawdriest little slut there ever was, why not slide the head in, just to see how you like it?” Uriah whispered, hitching his hips up to press his cunt for a dizzying instant against my cockhead. “No more than that, for I don’t deserve it—only to get a feel of the thing yourself.”

I _believe_ I knew I oughtn’t to do that under any circumstances, but Uriah lifted his hips again and I found my own jerking forward, pushing my cockhead into that sweet succour.

“Lord,” I said, shaking, “Oh _lord._ ”

Uriah made an obscene groan and threw back his head, exposing his throat. “That’s it—Christ, it’s just as good as it tastes.”

I rocked the head into him a fraction of a millimetre, just to feel his cunt around me.

“Try sliding it in,” Uriah said eagerly, “just to see how you like it. Just the once. Very slowly now,” he said, gritting his teeth as I raised myself a little and let gravity push me down, “so you get a good idea of the thing. And all the way,” he breathed, as, with patience, I worked myself down until my knot rested at the threshold of his cunt. “Oh David!” Having strained up to meet me, he flopped back on the bed like he hadn’t any bones. “it’s _eavenly_.”

So it was. To look down and see my ready knot pressed firmly against his cunt—to smell what I was doing to him—I nearly swooned with the intensity of it. I dragged myself back out of him again, more for the feeling of it than to escape my predicament, and Uriah voiced his considerable pleasure at the movement. He wrapped his legs around me, pressing me closer once more, threatening to push my very knot into him. I rocked back and forward.

“Now keep doing just that, just as careful as you’re going, and you won’t come too quickly,” Uriah said. Lost to reason I began to fuck him with these slow strokes, letting him snag against me as though he’d catch and keep me and then, with pendulum regularity, soundly finding my mark deep within him once again. Uriah began to breathe in small, rhythmic pants.

“Now do exactly that,” Uriah begged, “but a bit harder, and fast as you like.”

I picked up the pace, marvelling at how sloppy and wet Uriah grew, at the ugly little desperate noises he made, at the way his nails clawed into my shoulders. 

“Do you like that, Uriah?” I asked in my loftiest tone, some imp of perversity driving me to it. 

“Harder yet,” Uriah pleaded. “Oh please, _please_ Copperfield. Do it like you fucked my poor mouth last rut, when you gave it to me like that. I don’t want to be able to breathe.”

I hefted his hips in my hands and set about smacking my pelvis into his, so that my already-swollen knot mashed into his cunt with every strike, nearly threatening to slide into that generous little aperture. I used him harshly, making him yelp and making him beg for it. I forced Uriah’s legs up higher, so that he had to drop his arms.

“I’ll show you how you drive me to touch myself, then,” Uriah snarled, catching my eye. With one hand he lifted up his cock, revealing the petal of a clitoris at its base. “See what a mess you make of me,” he chastised, dabbling his free fingers in his copious slick, which welled out even around my cock. “I’m ready for you, you can’t say I’m not!” Uriah stroked his own cock with shocking brutality, but his clitoris he treated to a maddeningly teasing circular stroke with his index finger, light as a whisper. 

The sight was so shockingly erotic that I slipped deep into Uriah, pushing my knot half in, and was obliged to finish the job. Uriah sobbed with it, and I began to fuck him still more cruelly, popping the knot itself into and out of his fluttering hole. Still his finger tapped at his clit with absolute delicacy—I could hardly stand to watch, it drove me out of my senses.

“Be a darling and take it, then,” I said with a manly severity that surprised me.

“Oh that’s it, that’s just it,” Uriah encouraged, rubbing at himself. “Make me take it, only you could! Rough as you like. Have your omega’s cunt at last, haven’t I earned it? Haven’t I been good for you? Sweet to you? Harder, haven’t I worked for that knot? Give it to me. Fill me right up. Oh David, say you’ll—”

He broke off in a gasp as I rocked the knot into him and swivelled my hips to grind it in. It flared with my completion, sticking fast, making Uriah choke and his hands falter. Even as I ached with coming, pumping my virgin seed into him, I violently pushed Uriah's still-moving hands aside, wanting to be the one touching that private, neat little bud. I rolled it under my thumb and Uriah shoved his hand into his mouth to bite it to stifle his squeal.

“Come for me, won’t you?” I said, pushing my hips flush against his and making him feel the weight of my swollen member. “There now, stuffed as you are, I think you’ll only need a little toying with. It ought to be the simplest thing in the world to—” Even as I said it, Uriah squeezed me like a vice, clenching around me in the rhythm of a sped up, syncopated heart beat. His whole body tensed, then dropped limp, and the sight itself heated me so that I rocked my stiff, locked member into his pliant, over-heated form, making him jerk and weakly say my name. I felt as much a conqueror as Alexander. 

I slumped over Uriah, possessive and replete, and for a few minutes he might have been unconscious, he was that spent. My cock still throbbed in him, sending an occasional jolt of pleasure through me. But then not even deepest carnal exhaustion could subdue Uriah for long. Soon he was stroking my back and, to my shock, taking advantage of our being locked together to press a slick-coated finger into my hitherto unsampled arse.

“They say,” he offered, seeming in the best of spirits, “that this is the way to an alpha’s heart, though they never will admit it.” Uriah twisted his clever finger in me, and I suddenly understood why any man who was not an omega, provided with a cunt as well as an arse, could ever want to be penetrated. The gesture sent another deep stab of sensation through my ensconced cock, and I felt my eyes roll back in my head. “And that it gets your alpha to give to give you just a drop more while he’s stuck in,” Uriah continued, leisurely rubbing the spot he’d found so efficacious. “My, you do seem to like it! And what a fine arse you’ve got.” He gave in a squeeze with his unoccupied hand. “Maybe next time I’ll fuck you until you’re fit to burst and _then_ let you come in this cunt you like so well, eh?” He twitched his hips to indicate it, and the action had me whimpering.

It took a minute or so of blinking on my part, but I began to comprehend what he’d just said, and from there what we’d just been at. I shoved Uriah’s hands away and pinned him down on the bed so he could do no more mischief. Next time. Of course there should be a next time, after all we’d done!

“My god,” I said, horror-struck, the euphoria of the moment fading. “What we’ve done—there’s no going back.” To think I’d been so hasty, so foolish! What would my Aunt say when she learned of this calamity—of my having wronged _Mister Wickfield’s omega clerk_ and, as a bare youth, locked myself into a marriage that might prove an unmitigated disaster? What were we to do? 

And yet didn’t I know the one course open to us? But I was full young to so commit myself, and I knew that I did not yet know what it was to be a man, let alone a husband. Suppose I proved a bad one, and so compounded the wrong I’d already done another? Tears pricked my eyes, though I cannot say whether they were the offspring of anger or fear or remorse.

And yet Uriah was a hard man to see as any kind of a soiled dove. He was more a carrion bird or corvid sort of fellow. When my panic subsided a degree, it occurred to me that this had not been a scheme entirely of my own devising. I had not fallen alone, after all. Indeed I began to suspect that if not pushed, I had at least been nudged. 

“Did you trick me? No,” I corrected myself, “perhaps not that, but you certainly took advantage of my age and inexperience—and yet what am I saying, when I ought to have handled _myself_ better, and I am low now, to blame my own intemperance on the Omega involved! Oh I am _wretched!_ ” I cried, and I meant it in all the senses going.

My accusations made Uriah look very sour indeed, but in case you have never experienced the phenomenon, I must own that it is rather difficult to remain angry with someone when one is inundated with pheromones, lax from toe to crown with fucking and still embedded in the offending individual, or in Uriah’s case, impaled upon same. At length my partner sighed and rolled his shoulders. 

“Well, I suppose I ought to be grateful that you’ve no intention of hiding it or disavowing the thing, when you know as well as I do that there was no bite, and thus you might think to try it. What a blessing it is! The wonder is, that you aren't taking it a good deal worse!” It was only now that I fully apprehended the degree to which Uriah did _not_ mean things he said in this fashion. 

I shook my head. “I can hardly apologise for starting like a spooked horse, Uriah. What sane man wouldn’t, in the face of such sudden changes? Though I am sorry indeed if I threw you, and I know that I am far, far from blameless in bringing this shock about.” I looked at him beneath me, at his deep-set eyes and guarded expression, and felt a peculiar protectiveness for him, recalling all Betsey had ever said about omegas’ vulnerability in such occasions. If Uriah had goaded me, in doing so he had relied absolutely on my goodness. If he’d acted out that I might chastise and forgive him, why, didn’t I want to do it? If he had wanted my attention, well, he had it now. And if I knew anything now, it was that Uriah deeply wanted me, and felt that want more truly than most people could feel anything, more honestly than I could ever doubt, discredit or turn away from. “The point,” I said, perhaps more gently than I’d spoken before, “is that it is done, not whether others know of it. We are claimed by one another: it is enough that we know it. Having done this, I could not by rights desert you.”

“No,” Uriah said, seeming wryly amused, and it occurred to me to wonder whether he sometimes regarded me with the same protective sort of tenderness I could at times feel for him. If he had said as much, I thought I should have believed him. “I don’t suppose David Copperfield could.” 

“And shall you be honest with me, Uriah?” I prompted. “As I have tried to be with you? —and think I shall always try to be in future, if you’ll attempt not to make it too awful to be so.”

He gave a dry, scraping chuckle at that. “Well,” he allowed, “perhaps I cozen you a pinch. I don’t think you’d have accepted such consolation as we’ve been enjoying, had I made such an offer very much later in your life. For you’d have known better, wouldn’t you? And you'd have been a mite less susceptible, besides. But as for this, no, I didn’t plan it. For once in my life I didn’t, and I’ll swear to it on the same article. I shouldn’t risk myself so far as that! It’s more a matter of my not having been quite master of _myself_ , owing to this damned heat, which I should have respected rather more than I did.” Uriah shook his head, rueful. “I can’t rightly say what I was thinking, Copperfield, if I was thinking at all. I couldn't bear to skip a month, and that's the plain truth of it. I should never have tried to have you like this when on an ordinary day I want you fit to die. You just carry me before you. You always do.”

I blinked at Uriah. I’d known he enjoyed our liaison, but this was putting the matter differently. I wondered whether he meant that I exercised a certain sway over him because I was an alpha, but he put that to bed before I could speak. 

“But you know,” Uriah said, arching an eyebrow at me, “I ain’t all that upset about what you may think will be an imprudent, and thus an unhappy marriage, brought about by our misconduct as it was. Perhaps you think I do well out of it, materially. I do. I’ll even admit to being pretty satisfied by the change in my expectations! But no one could do better for you, you’ll see—I’ll bring you the crown jewels if you want ‘em, and if you won’t ask too many questions as to how I come to have ‘em. You said I’d make someone a good mate, and I think you meant it. Well I will, Copperfield, if someone's you.”

“That’s handsome of you,” I said, rendered reasonable by his being so frank and sensible about the matter (though still conscious of our ridiculous physical position, coupled together like stage coach horses obliged to take one path regardless of their individual inclinations). “We are of course dynamically matched, and quite compatible in our present connection,” (Uriah gave me a leer for that; I persevered.) “and while you might not have chosen me freely I swear to be good to you, and to honour the hope and faith you’ve just expressed.”

Uriah barked a laugh. “Bless you. ‘Dynamically matched’ indeed. I adore you, you know. Couldn’t wait to get my hands on you.” He shook his head. “When you let me taste you in January, I thought Christmas had come either a little late or excessively early, and was all the better for it. You can’t know how long I’ve liked you terribly—how I’ve wanted to give myself to you, and have you take me up.” 

That put yet another complexion on the matter. When Uriah had told me that he had come into his first heat when he was fifteen, hard upon my entering the household, it had not quite occurred to me that he had given me rather an important piece of information. Perhaps even as Uriah was my idea of an alpha, I was his notion of the reverse disposition.

“Lord I hope I’m pregnant,” Uriah murmured, as though to himself. “I’m restless to get a start on that.” He then looked at me properly. (Perhaps taking in my dazed expression at the unexpected eroticism of the idea of impregnating my omega, knowing myself every inch an alpha and a man.) “Though you’re a _little_ young yet to be a father, I’ll admit—almost still a boy yourself.” I bristled at this, and Uriah added, “and yet, Master Copperfield, such a vigorous, strapping alpha, capable beyond his years, who took me apart and dispatched my virginity so neatly you’d think him a queer sort of executioner!” to soothe me, giving a most distracting squirm on my cock. I was somewhat mollified. Having dealt with me thoroughly and adroitly, Uriah sighed, shaking his head. “I fear we shall have to be a bit more disciplined when married, if we’re not to breed like wild rabbits—such a struggle, but I expect we’ll only fail a bit of the time.”

I found I could like the idea of marriage with a clever helpmeet who wanted me with a will, who drew me to him like thread being wound around a bobbin and who would provide me with a safe home and some sense of direction in my uncertain future. I had thought to become a man singular and alone—now I looked to do it with the fundamental security provided by an inseparable companion who cared for me and who I must care for in turn, who I saw I could come to give my passion, affection and duty to. In retrospect I see that I was already coming to give him all that, though to nothing like the degree I would in years to come. Indeed the chief failure of these early good intentions has in all honestly been our ten children, though I do not account them as such. I should not, Uriah tells me, expect too much of myself in this regard, for after all, I have never had a very disciplined heart, and thankfully (he is almost unbearably smug on this point) we can afford it.


End file.
